An award-winning Australian theatre director known for championing new Australian work, Sarah Goodes is proof that no matter how much you have accomplished in your creative field, it is possible to diverge into new avenues that both complement and evolve your career.
And that the Australian Film Television and Radio School’s (AFTRS) Master of Arts Screen: Business is the course that can take you there.
To place her career in perspective, Goodes has directed 20-plus new productions for major companies including Sydney Theatre Company (Resident Director, 2012-16) and the Melbourne Theatre Company (Associate Artistic Director, 2016-21). Highlights in recent years include Break of Day by Stevie Rodgers from Old House Theatre, The Talented Mr Ripley (STC), Julia by Joanna Murray-Smith starring Justine Clarke, and sell-out seasons in Melbourne and Sydney of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Goodes was awarded a Helpmann Award for Best Director on The Children in 2018 where the production won three awards for Best Direction, Best Production and Best Actor.
Already armed with a postgraduate degree in Theatre Directing at VCA and an undergraduate at UNSW and the University of California San Diego, she enrolled in the AFTRS Master of Arts Screen: Business course on a pathway towards translating theatre to film and developing new TV and film projects with Australia’s best actors and writers.
This led Goodes to co-founding Jacaranda Productions in 2025 with fellow student/actor-producer Diana Glenn, whose extensive portfolio includes Carla Cametti PD, The Secret Life of Us, The Slap, Jack Irish, Secrets and Lies, Bad Behaviour, In Our Blood and feature films such as Black Water, Oyster Farmer, Somersault and Lone Wolf.
“Diana and I have been friends for years and we’ve worked together,” Goodes recently explained to Caris Bizzaca of the Breaking Screen podcast. “She’s an award-winning actor and we’ve done a couple of plays together and she started studying the Master of Arts Screen: Business at AFTRS and suggested that I do it as well.
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“One of the main reasons I decided to enrol at AFTRS is that I’d had four years as a resident director at Sydney Theatre Company, and then five years at Melbourne Theatre Company.You sort of reach a level where you’re thinking about what’s next, and one of the things I love the most is bringing teams of people together to tell a particular story. That becomes harder the higher up you go in the theatre world, sometimes, because you actually have to be inside the companies for those resources. And we thought, ‘Well, why don’t we try and develop a new way of making theatre of scale outside or in collaboration with those companies?’.”
Goodes notes that AFTRS also allowed her to appropriately zoom out and see things from a different perspective, stepping beyond theatre to take a multi-layered look at film and television. The beauty of the course, she states, is its forward-facing nature.
“It’s very much about innovation,” she notes. “It’s very much about big thinking, about what’s possible, about what the future is, about how to adapt to change, what interruptions are. And at a time and an age where you might start to sort of start thinking, ‘Look, the world’s changing around me and I don’t have to be a part of it’, it forces you to go further into it.
“I was able to take that distance from theatre to see what its real impact and what its real strengths are in this current environment and how some of the things that are happening are sort of breaking everything down and what the opportunities come from that.”
Goodes has always thought of storytelling in anthropological terms – storytellers convey their tales in the context of the time in which they are alive, the age they are and the context of which they’re telling it.
“The course really makes you look at the whole of everything, the country where we’re in, the technology, the past, the future… and it’s very difficult at times,” she noted.
“It was really challenging. And at other times, it was really, really exhilarating to be made to work quickly, to be made to think big, to sort of jump into things and investigate them and then jump onto the next thing at a time when you’ve spent so long in one thing that you start to solidify a little bit.
“So it’s really great for your brain. It’s really great to step outside and look at things from a different perspective and to look at the possibilities of working in other mediums.”
Goodes was already well aware of the excellence that AFTRS has always exemplified and encouraged in others. She clearly appreciates the understanding shown by the lecturers and cohort about her career history and life commitments as she navigated the course over two-and-a-half years (the course can be completed full time in one year).
“AFTRS has always been the place where a lot of the great people in the industry have come from,” she said. “Then the lecturers there were really, really supportive as well. They understood that I was directing shows and running things and have a family and they understood the pressure with which you’re under when you’re studying at this stage in your life and career. So that was really great and you could do it remotely and in person.
“Places like NIDA and AFTRS, their strength is that when you go there, you’re constantly meeting people and hearing from people that are out in the industry working. You’re making connections with them and you’re right in it because they’re coming to you, and that’s the most important thing. You really need those opportunities and AFTRS really offers them.”
Jacaranda Productions is already proving itself as a platform for Australian storytelling having launched with Amplified, The Exquisite Rock And Rage Of Chrissy Amphlett, which toured nationally.
With the assistance of a Creative Australia grant they are adapting Charlotte Wood’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Stone Yard Devotional for the stage and have partnered with Byron Bay/Los Angeles-based XR studio New Canvas for the forthcoming five-part VR noir series, Coltrane.
“It’s the driving passion behind Jacaranda that Diana and I have set up – the importance of having our own stories and seeing our own stories on stage,” Goodes explained. “I know that it sort of sounds obvious, but I think at the moment when we have these streaming services that are an endless tide of stories coming from overseas, it’s easy to forget the feeling that audiences and people get when they see their own lives.
“And no matter how much work I’ve done, I always come back to it.”
The Master of Arts Screen: Business at AFTRS is now taking applications for their next intake. To find out more about the course, head here.